I had a request from another customer to make some more bike heart pendants. These are fun to make but take a while due to all the piercing and sawing. They are not complicated, just involved, so I thought it might be fun to take some process photos and share how they are made.

Start by prepping and cleaning the copper, then I apply the printed design to the copper with rubber cement.

I am making two of them...

Then plan out where you are going to drill all your holes, I do this by hand with a little manual drill (I find power drills to be a little hard to control sometimes when I want to drill into really tight areas). You can do this with a punch and a strike plate first if you are having trouble keeping the drill bit from jumping around.

lots of holes.

Then the fun part, cut out all the tiny pieces.

notice it is still kind of rough around the edges, no sanding has been done yet.

Then I sand, file, and finish the copper with some liver of sulfur.

I use a slightly thicker gauge copper for the pendants than for the earrings, mostly for strength, and also because it gives it more dimension.